FFF Warbird – Hawker Hurricane

I haven’t been able to fly my RC planes in a few months due to mainly time restraints, but the other day I decided to build me a warbird and fly it. After looking around on RCGroups and talking to a few people, I decided on building a Hawker Hurricane. The original plans for the airplane had a ~30″ wingspan. My motor is pretty big and I knew it was wayyy to heavy for a little 30″ WS plane, so I scaled the plans up to get a 48″ WS plane. I didn’t really take any build pictures because I guess I forgot, but I’ll tell briefly about the construction of the plane.

The plane is build from 1/4″ FFF (Fan Fold Foam). The fuselage is 6 layers of foam laminated together to get a thick and strong fuselage. The original plan only calls for 4 layers, but because I was making it bigger, I added an extra layer on each side of the fuse. The fuse is pretty cool because with the laminations there are little ‘tunnels’ in the fuselage for routing wires and stuff. This makes the plane pretty streamlined and all the electronics are pretty much out of sight. The wing is a Kfm2 wing. I decided to add a degree or two of dihedral to the wing for better stability. I did this by bending a brass tube and attaching two pieces of carbon fibre tube to it for the wing spars. This later failed on me (watch video) so I wouldn’t recommend using a brass tube. Maybe a thick piece of music wire instead. I did all the camouflage with sharpie. I added the red color for better visibility in the air. For the power system I am using an Exceed RC 1050Kv Brushless outrunner, a 1300mah 3s Lipo, a 30A ESC, and a 1147 prop.

After fixing the wing problem (watch video) I really enjoyed flying this airplane. It handles the wind very nicely and with the power setup I can go vertical so I have plenty of power to pull up out of tough situations. When I flew in the video the wind was blowing around 18-20mph (according to the Weather Channel).